CONSOCIATIONAL DEMOCRACY 209 pressures toward moderate middle-of-the-road attitudes are absent.Po- litical stability depends on moderation and,therefore,also on over- lapping memberships.Truman states this proposition as follows:"In the long run a complex society may experience revolution,degenera- tion,and decay.If it maintains its stability,however,it may do so in large measure because of the fact of multiple memberships."Bentley calls compromise"the very process itself of the criss-cross groups in action.And Lipset argues that"the chances for stable democracy are enhanced to the extent that groups and individuals have a number of crosscutting,politically relevant affiliations.Sometimes Almond him- self explicitly adopts the terminology of these propositions:for in- stance,he describes the French Fourth Republic as being divided into "three main ideological families or subcultures,"which means that the people of France were "exposed to few of the kinds of 'cross-pres- sures'that moderate [their]rigid political attitudes,"while,on the other hand,he characterizes the United States and Britain as having an “overlapping pattern”of membership. In his later writings,Almond maintains both the threefold typology of Western democracies and the criteria on which it is based,although the terms that he uses vary considerably.In an article published in 1963, for instance,he distinguishes between "stable democracies"and "im- mobilist democracies."The latter are characterized by "fragmentation, both in a cultural and structural sense"and by the absence of "con- sensus on governmental structure and process"(i.e.the Continental European systems).The former group is divided into two sub-classes: one includes Great Britain,the United States,and the Old Common- wealth democracies (i.e.the Anglo-American systems),and the other "the stable multi-party democracies of the European continent-the Scandinavian and Low Countries and Switzerland."1 And in Com- parative Politics:A Developmental Approach,published in 1966,a distinction is drawn between modern democratic systems with "high subsystem autonomy"(the Anglo-American democracies)and those with "limited subsystem autonomy"and fragmentation of political David B.Truman,The Governmental Process:Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York I951),508,5II. 1Arthur F.Bentley,The Process of Government:A Study of Social Pressures,4th ed. (Evanston 1955),208. s Seymour Martin Lipset,Political Man:The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City I960),88-89. Almond and G.Bingham Powell,Jr.,Comparative Politics:A Developmental Ap- proach (Boston 1g66),122,263;Almond and Sidney Verba,The Civic Culture:Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton 1963),134. 10"Political Systems and Political Change,"American Behavioral Scientist,vI (June I963),9-I0